The Nocturnal Visit

If only enough people are convinced of the same, it becomes an universal truth.

I love the autumn - it is the most colorful of all seasons. Not only the foliage shines in a fascinating range of colors - from green to yellow to dark red; also the skies show the most magnificent shades. Have you ever compared the sunrise in the fall with that in summer? In autumn, the clouds seem to burn in the sky, initially in bright red, which changes more and more to pink, then orange, then yellow, until finally, all color completely fades away. This magic lasts ten, fifteen minutes at the most. In the evening the spectacle is repeated in reversed sequence: the world is wrapped in a gorgeous orange; the shade of the trees, people and houses creep on the ground and grow longer and larger, until eventually they become one with the dawn. And then, inevitably, the one thing I fear the most of everything in the world turns in: the darkness. While light has an almost enchanting effect on me, darkness practically disturbs me.

This impossible fear returns to me every night ever since my childhood. My parents have gone almost insane; for hours they have been soothing me and talking me to sleep; they spent all their energy trying to convince me that the fact that world is invisible in the dark does not mean that it is differently arranged. But I never wanted to accept that. I was and still am firmly convinced that the world is indeed changing at night. Do not the songbirds pause their singing after dark? Do not the flowers close their blossoms once the sunlight no longer shines on them? Do not the raptors, the bats and many other predators wait for the night to fall to appear from their hiding place? So! Who could tell with certainty that there are no monsters at night, also creeping out from their hidings - beings we do not encounter during the day, like the badger or the barn owl - and yet no one would deny their existence. Do people not fear invisible beings since the earliest days of their existence, whether the objects of fear are gods, demons or natural phenomena? Certainly some of these ideas are being ridiculed today, but even today there are six and a half billion people who believe in a God, and none of those people will be able to claim to have ever met his eyes.

Forgive me this impassioned debauchery: I only wanted to lay the basis of the following narrative, since many would give no credence to the things I am to tell. To those I turn when I say: what one cannot prove, one has to believe. Theories are not proven, but believed in by a large number of people. I ask my readers only to consider the verity of my story.

The wind howled eerily on that evening and mingled with the cry of the owl, which always used to linger near my house. In the distance I heard the sound of madly barking dogs. My light curtains danced on the waves of air, and formed into a ghostlike appearance; a waving figure who repeatedly entered my room and then moved away again.

I lay in my bed, restless, and pulled the covers a little tighter over my body. I could not keep my eyes off the flying curtains. My heart was pounding. I only had to close the balcony door, but I was too scared for leaving my safe little nest. I fervently hoped that the roaring weather would lie down and give me back my night's rest.

A glance at the clock told me that it was a little after three. The night’s blackness had reached its summit. It was not until three hours later that it would begin to dawn, and only then would the darkness, that had made me so anxious since birth, give way for the first daylight, the splendid reddish light of autumn. Eagerly I wished for this first hint of dawn. I sighed deeply and was just about to turn around, in order to no longer see the fluttering curtains, when I heard a thud on the balcony. I winced and tried to convince myself that it was nothing, like my parents always used to do, but then, undeniably, I observed a moving shadow outside. The shape straightened up, stood motionless for a moment, and then moved towards the open door. I was terrified, yet unable to scream. The curtains were pushed aside, and a figure - a real form, not some shape of curtain fabric - entered the room. It is hard to describe what it looked like, but I will try. The figure was tall, almost gigantic, since it reached up to the ceiling. Despite the relative brightness in my room (you will understand that I always kept a light burning beside my bed, to not be enclosed by complete darkness), the figure was jet black. It was clear to me that it was a human-like being - or had been at some time. I could distinguish two legs and two arms, as well as a head, though the eyes, mouth and nose were not recognizable at first. But as soon as the apparition approached, the contours and the entire picture became clearer. The approaching steps plunged heavily on the floor, just as faint as they had sounded on the balcony previously. I now saw that the creature was wrapped in a thick coat, which it had pulled over his head, but now it struck the cap backwards, and I got to see him better: in the middle of a sunken, white face, two pitch-black eyes looked at me intently, though not threatening. The nose was distinctive, the lips thin. I was still petrified, the blanket pulled up to my chin and trembling over my whole body. The figure stood right next to me and leaned over me. I was sure my end had come, and closed my eyes. But instead of killing me or pushing his teeth down my throat, I heard that he sniffed. Although I was paralyzed with fear, I remember well how much I was surprised by that: I had expected a violent assault, an attack, yes, I even believed that this creature would suck my blood: but none of that! All it did was to smell. I opened my eyes just so much that I could spy through my lashes, and perceived how the blood seemed to return to the cheeks of the uncanny visitor. The tone of his face that had been white, yes almost transparent, now colored pink. He took a deep breath and relieved, as if life had just returned to him, which actually looked just so - had a corpse like figure entered my room; now a normal-looking, albeit very large, man was turning away from me. He was gone before I had completely processed what had happened. It took a while before I dared to move again and found that nothing was missing. The mysterious visitor had done nothing to me, neither to my belongings. Everything behaved as if nothing had happened: the owl and the dogs made the same noise as before the visit; the wind howled as strained as before, so that I almost wondered if I had not dreamed the whole thing.

The following morning I woke up (how I had been able to fall asleep after a nocturnal visit of this kind is unclear to me to this very day) and reminded at once what had occurred. The event seemed, now that the coming daylight brightened my room, even more unlikely than it had been at night. The thing worked me up to a headache and I was about to agree on that it had been a life-like dream, when I saw a fluttering piece of thick, black substance, that was stuck in the doorway. It dawned on me that the visitor had stumbled when leaving the room: apparently a piece of his coat had been ripped off in that moment. Carefully I took the piece of cloth, stepped out into the sunlight to give it a better look. However, within moments it crumbled in my fingers, until nothing was left of it. Befuddled I stared at my empty hand. Nothing! Nothing had remained of the fabric that I had kept in my hands a few moments ago!

No one whom I told of my nocturnal experience within the days that followed, did believe me. All knew of my phobia of darkness and assigned my fantastic tale to this fear. But I knew I spoke the truth, and did not want to reduce my experience to a mere fantasy. Finally, I gave up trying to convince my friends, and decided to write down my story, hoping to, in this way, find a fellow human being who had experienced the same as me: for I now believe that not only I have been visited by this creature. My theory is as follows: this being is our own creation: we, the anxious, created it, and now it lives out there, and feeds on our fear.